Scott Hanselman

According to the Dapr open source website:

"Dapr helps developers build event-driven, resilient distributed applications. Whether on-premises, in the cloud, or on an edge device, Dapr helps you tackle the challenges that come with building microservices and keeps your code platform agnostic."

I've had Mark Russinovich on my podcast recently to talk about Dapr which is now at version 1.0. Dapr is platform agnostic, and you can use Dapr with your language of choice by leveraging an SDK or making simple HTTP or gRPC calls. Dapr is language agnostic and can run on any hosting environment including local development machines, Kubernetes, and public clouds such as AWS, Azure and GCP. The Dapr sidecar container collects traces so your application is instrumented with no additional code.

Since a lot of folks who read my blog use .NET, I wanted to let you know there's a free eBook on how to use Dapr with .NET available now.
You can download the free eBook "Dapr for .NET Developers" here now! It's available as a PDF and it's being actively improved so can offer feedback to the authors directly via GitHub issue.

Congrats to Rob Vetter, Sander Molenkamp, and Edwin van Wijk and for their hard work on this book!

This free book covers common needs for complex cloud apps and how to make it happen with Dapr and .NET, including:

• State management
• Service invocation
• Pub/sub
• Bindings
• Observability
• Secrets
• Dapr .NET SDK
• and more.

Dapr enables developers using any language or framework to easily write microservices. It addresses many of the challenges found that come along with distributed applications, such as:

• How can distributed services discover each other and communicate synchronously?
• How can they implement asynchronous messaging?
• How can they maintain contextual information across a transaction?
• How can they become resilient to failure?
• How can they scale to meet fluctuating demand?
• How are they monitored and observed?

There's also a project at the dotnet-architecture GitHub that includes a complete sample app (go give them a GitHub star, please, for their hard work!) that takes the eShopOnContainers project and instruments it with Dapr!

eShopOnDapr runs in containers and requires Docker to run. There are various ways to start the application:

• Run eShopOnDapr from the CLI
• Run eShopOnDapr from Visual Studio (best F5 debugging experience)
• Run eShopOnDapr from Visual Studio Code (allows you to debug individual containers))
• Run eShopOnDapr in Kubernetes

Hope you enjoy it! The team would really hard on making it happen.

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About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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This is pretty cool. As you may know, when you type "dotnet new" from the command line, or if you turn on the Visual Studio preview feature "Show all .NET Core templates in the New Project Dialog" that you see a bunch of potential starter templates. These are basic jumping off points for your next new project.

Some folks feel there should be more included "out of the box." Enter "dotnet-boxed" templates! You can install them from the command line easily like this:

dotnet new --install Boxed.Templates

You can confirm they are there by running dotnet new at the command line. The new "boxed" templates have a different tag:

Templates                    Short Name  Tags
----------------------------------------------------------  
ASP.NET Core API Boxed       api         .NET Boxed/Cloud/Service/Web
ASP.NET Core GraphQL Boxed   graphql     .NET Boxed/Cloud/Service/Web
ASP.NET Core Orleans Boxed   orleans     .NET Boxed/Cloud/Service/Web
NuGet Package Boxed          nuget       .NET Boxed/Library

Let's try them out! I can see them here in the File New Project dialog in VS2019:

There's a really nice project that sets up a NuGet package right from File New! It can even set up Test, GitHub Actions, .editorconfig, license, cake build, code of conduct, and more. All that boring boilerplate is done for you!

This is just one template example, there are also ones for WebAPIs, GraphQL projects, and Microsoft Orleans projects.

DotNet-boxed is a great community supported project! Head over to GitHub now and give them a STAR and get involved! Even better, I see some "help wanted" issues on their GitHub. I'm sure they'd appreciate your help. https://github.com/Dotnet-Boxed/Templates

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About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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One of the things I'm always working on and am always excited about is making C# simpler for new folks.

With .NET 5, today, this works, as it includes C# 9

> dotnet new console
The template "Console Application" was created successfully

> echo System.Console.WriteLine("Hello World"); > program.cs

> dotnet run
Hello World

That's C# 9 top level programs. We should be able to remove even more. Skip the first command completely and do it all on one line, one file.

A hello world is either

using System;

Console.WriteLine("Hello World!");

or

System.Console.WriteLine("Hello World!");

or, scandalously

using System;
using static System.Console;

WriteLine("Hello World!");

Not sure how I feel about that last one. Regardless...would this work in Visual Studio 2019? What if I was teaching a class and wanted to have one file per homework assignment, for example? Right now Visual Studio only supports one top-level program per project. Make sense why, but for learning, why not allow folks to choose from the run/debug menu?

I'm going to add a reference to SmallSharp like this (or in Visual Studio)

> dotnet add package smallsharp

Now here's what my homework looks like in Visual Studio 2019! There's one menu item per top level program!

This lovely prototype was done by Daniel Cazzulino (kzu) and you can learn more at https://github.com/devlooped/SmallSharp, or just try it out as I have here!

What do you think? How can small top-level programs help new people?

What about this?

> dotnet new microservice
> dotnet run 

Sound off in the comments. How tight and simple would that be?

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About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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Turns out you can install both the Windows Terminal AND the Windows Terminal Preview side by side! This will let you try out all the upcoming features in this "skip next" version. You can grab the next version of the Windows Terminal at https://aka.ms/terminal-preview now.

The two Terminals can be pinned side by side if you like. Here you can see the Preview Terminal has a "Pre" badge in the taskbar.

Historically you've had to edit a settings.json file - usually with Visual Studio Code and it's lovely json schema support, natch - but as of Windows Terminal 1.6, you've got a preview of the long-awaited Settings UI.

Get the Terminal 1.6 Preview, press Ctrl+, to get your settings.json, then paste this down by the actions array at the bottom:

{ "command": { "action": "openSettings", "target": "settingsUI" }, "keys": "ctrl+shift+," },

That'll make Ctrl+Shift+, bring up the new Settings UI!

Here is just one section! I thought I know all the settings but there's a TON I missed. You'll also notice all my Profiles on the left PLUS a Base Layer for inheritance. I was pleased to see the Grayscale vs ClearType (subpixel rgb anti-aliasing) choice, as well as some of the more obscure cursor options.

A real color schema editor is also overdue, so it was awesome to see that as well.

You can, of course, hop between JSON the UI. Here's the UbuntuLegit (from Kayla!) color schema as a UI, above, and as JSON, below.

{
    "background": "#2C001E",
    "black": "#75F50A",
    "blue": "#3465A4",
    "brightBlack": "#555753",
    "brightBlue": "#729FCF",
    "brightCyan": "#34E2E2",
    "brightGreen": "#8AE234",
    "brightPurple": "#AD7FA8",
    "brightRed": "#EF2929",
    "brightWhite": "#EEEEEE",
    "brightYellow": "#FCE94F",
    "cursorColor": "#FFFFFF",
    "cyan": "#06989A",
    "foreground": "#EEEEEE",
    "green": "#300A24",
    "name": "UbuntuLegit",
    "purple": "#75507B",
    "red": "#CC0000",
    "selectionBackground": "#FFFFFF",
    "white": "#D3D7CF",
    "yellow": "#C4A000"
},

I've been using Windows Terminal Preview as my primary lately, even over the "more stable" released version. Fortunately I can run both, but the Preview is my go-to right now.

Related Links

• Taking your PowerShell prompt to the next level with Windows Terminal and Oh my Posh 3
• How to make a pretty prompt in Windows Terminal with Powerline, Nerd Fonts, Cascadia Code, WSL, and oh-my-posh

Sponsor: Protect your apps from reverse engineering and tampering with PreEmptive, the makers of Dotfuscator. Dotfuscator has been in-the-box with Microsoft Visual Studio since 2003. Visit preemptive.com/hanselminutes for a professional-grade trial.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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If you have a TV, you can turn it into a fancy conference room monitor and pretend you have a Surface Hub 2S. Let's see the different ways we can make Teams/Zoom meetings more a "walking around and thinking" experience, and less a "hunched in front of the laptop" experience.

Cheapest/Good - Wire up to a big TV

You can just get a nice HDMI cable and plug it into your TV and duplicate or extend your laptop's screen. In this simple scenario you're using your Laptop's mic and webcam, and just using the screen of your TV. You can also check your audio output and use the TV speakers as output if you like.

Doing this is not just a nice change of pace, but it reminds you of the options you have to hold meetings! It's your space...how many ways can you change your boring meeting into a new perspective by using the same space in a new way?

Cheap/Better - Wireless to a big TV

If you want to be wireless, you can use Miracast (if your computer/laptop/Surface supports it) or AirPlay or AirServer to "throw" your screen wirelessly to your TV. Some Samsung Smart TV support wireless communications built-in!

• You may be able to throw from Windows to a Smart TV with AirServer software. You may be able to throw with AirPlay on your Mac to an Apple TV.
• You may be able to get a Miracast HDMI dongle (amzn link) and make a dumb TV smart. This is the solution I use. I throw my Surface screen over Miracast to the TV.

Less Cheap/Best (for me) - Wireless to a big TV with a wireless Webcam via my iPhone

I have a TV on my wall in my office, but it doesn't lend itself to wires and moving my laptop. I wanted to throw the screen over there AND also have a webcam on top of the TV. Ideally there'd be a webcam in the bezel of the TV, but there isn't.

What's an ideal and cheap webcam? My iPhone is already a great device with a long life battery, it's portable, and a webcam. You can get a number of apps that will enable you to use your iPhone (or Android) as a webcam.

I decided on Elgato EpocCom to turn my iPhone into a webcam.

Troubleshooting: The docs aren't amazing, so you'll want to not only install the software, but confirm that the EpocCamService is enabled in the Windows Firewall for both Private AND Public Networks (or ensure your network is the same type as the type that's enabled for this service.) I had to manually allow the EpocCam Service to work on Private Networks.

Then you'll get the iPhone side of the app and your iPhone will show up as a camera. With the Pro version ($7.99) you'll get higher quality and microphone support.

Now I just put my iPhone on the top of the TV, run the EpocCam software, and then on my PC I throw my video to the TV and select the EpocCam virtual Camera. Now I can wander around my office and pace and talk and think, which is great!

Here I've got my Samsung Frame TV (amzn link) (I got it for just $600 as it's the 2018 model, I love it) and I've hooked up the Microsoft Wireless Display Adapter v2 (amzn link).

Other Alternatives

Once you familiarize yourself with these wireless options for throwing video and audio around, you'll find there is no right answer. There's only the answer that works for you! The results will be similar, but some of the solutions will fit better into your system or setup.

Here's some other ideas.

• Use NDI Tools to throw formally throw video around your office and catch it with OBS or XSplit
• Use a really long USB extension code and mount a cheap webcam on the top of the TV
• Just use your iPhone or iPad or Android device and join Teams or Zoom with the phone itself! Then either wired (via adapter and HDMI) or wirelessly connect the device to your TV!

Leave your solutions in the comments!

There also appear to be Teams devices that will take a TV or Display and Teamsify it! I'll go educate myself about those as well!

Sponsor: Protect your apps from reverse engineering and tampering with PreEmptive, the makers of Dotfuscator. Dotfuscator has been in-the-box with Microsoft Visual Studio since 2003. Visit preemptive.com/hanselminutes for a professional-grade trial.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

About   Newsletter

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